Ten Years Of This

So some moron made this twitter account...

Then, this idiot didn't get the moron's joke and said it was me:

So then the moron protested to the idiot

The idiot still didn't believe him, so the moron moved to his direct messages...

I mean you can't make this stuff up, like...

Like if you wrote that in a script it'd be too on the nose.

Ah but wait...how did I get the screenshot? Because idiot still didn't believe it even after the offer to provide a photo and kept going and showed everyone...

So here I am, involved in court cases on multiple continents with many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lawyers raking over everything I do every day and the idiot thinks I'm going to just spend saturday night making a new account and pretending to be a different guy in his DMs?

And he was fool enough to post it, therefore providing a very handy "Exhibit A" if I ever need to prove Mandy inspired an army of losers to harass me.

And as if that wasn't stupid enough, then Alexis-- the Tao of D&D blogger--gets involved. So I post some evidence:

And then--remember I've been in the middle of legal action for a year--Alexis alleges that the witness--whose document is part of a phonebook-sized affadavit of documents, a person with 33,000 twitter followers and who's been in porn for literal decades is not a real person:

And look, my comment got 1 like? That's sweet. From who?

Guys:

This keystone cops shit where a guy tries to harass me, gets harassed by someone else who was also trying to harass me because they want to say its me, who then is outed while openly saying they're harassing me, then some kind-of-respected colleague gets on and announces the entire legal and porn profession has been fooled and a witness in this case doesn't exist?

This isn't even weird. This isn't a product of what happened last year. This has been going on for ten fucking years. The people fecklessly making up shit about this were fecklessly making up shit about Vampire: The Masquerade the year before and Paolo Greco the year before that and 4e the year before that and on and on forever.

Fully-employed dipshits with total confidence in things that get disproved in less than a minute or just so dedicated to trolling they will pretend they are without a second thought. And the person who wants their colleagues to stop doing this is the bad guy?

Maybe all of this is just normal to you, but after a year of legal action I can tell you: nobody outside of the tiny bubble of online RPGs does anything but look at this shit and go "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"

-Z



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P.S. Go buy something:

Four Islands (Cube World #12) now in the store

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Nephilidia! Win Stuff! Correct Walpole Languray Contest!

As you may know if you keep up with The Store, Nephilidia is up! This one took a while to collate...

I tried to do an Ian Miller old man tree monster but it just looks like a guy
trying to give you pills at an Electric Wizard show

So decadent are the vampire lords of Nephilidia that they fear equally the sun, the sea, dry land, and, indeed any surface not hewn by an intelligent hand. Distinguishable from ordinary vampires by the gills on their necks and their glassy blue eyes, they prefer to travel via subterranean aqueducts, sewers, or other shallow, watertight, artificial constructions.

Most prefer never to leave their half-drowned empire of Nephilidia. Inside its tarnished palaces and rotting halls they sit--forever knee-deep in black and stagnant water, with strange algaes stretched like cobwebs from the surface to the once-ornate walls and crumbling statuary--endlessly elaborating cruel and languid intrigues, attended by naught but eyeless fish.

Nephilidia once had another name, and another before that, but now it is only Nephilidia—the sun’s weakened gleam silhouetting nothing but immense sea spiders and the scaffolds of illegible, unmoving machines rusting in snow and the enormous moon, in its turn, describing only the charcoaled surfaces of black-armored knights and the pale of their ghost-colored steeds.

This 23-page pdf includes a hexmap, random encounter tables for the sea, snow, and ruins, Nephilidian dungeon generator, map of the last palace, stats, items and lots more. 12$, 15$ if you use Onlyfans. Details on how to buy in The Store. 

I realized while putting this together that the entire idea for Nephilidia came from this Sutherland image from the 1e Dungeon Master's Guide...

So I homaged it...

(this was my third attempt)

Anyway though I'm happy with Nephilidia, I realize for some of you in this Covid-economy it may be too pricey, so I am once again offering....

A Contest

So, as you know, Into The Odd's Chris McDowall runs the OSR discord server and, last year, I guess to enable the harassment campaign against me and LotFP? He changed the rules to allow lying on the server.

So in addition to the usual lunacy, we regularly get gems like this, about the various sections of Maze of the Blue Medusa, drawn and painted by me and written by Patrick Stuart and I...

So here's the contest:

Answer the following trivia questions about Maze of the Blue Medusa in the comments:

1) Name anything from Maze of the Blue Medusa that was Patrick Stuart's idea

2) Name anything from Maze of the Blue Medusa that was Zak Smith's idea

3) Who conceived of- and wrote most of- The Gallery section of Maze of the Blue Medusa with its ill-behaved Cannibal Critics and their absurd questions?

4) Who conceived of- and wrote most of- The Garden in Maze of the Blue Medusa with its creepy eroticized plants?

5) What major change was made by one author of Maze to the Garden section? By which author?

6) Who conceived of- and wrote most of- The Wedding section of Maze of the Blue Medusa?

7) Who was the personality of the Medusa based on? Who decided that?

8) Who was the personality of the naked girl who destroys everything she touches based on? Who decided that?

9) Who was the physical model for the painting of the Blue Medusa?

10) Who invented the chameleon women?

You can find the answers to these questions by fact checking. That is: reviewing public statements and interviews by me and Patrick, by asking Patrick (he has a blog, I hear), or figuring them out by looking at the answers in the comments when I tell people they're wrong and how warm or cold they are. I mean, you can just guess until you get it right if you're dedicated.

First person to get all the questions right wins!

Winner gets a copy of any pdf of any one RPG thing I wrote--except Nephilidia, because I just finished and it took a long time and I'm not ready to be giving it away yet.

Second chance:

If you want a pdf but can't afford one and don't win the contest, you can get one by contacting Wapole Languray on discord (on the OSR server or anywhere else) and conveying the correct answers to them, with a screenshot.

A Red & Pleasant Land Miscellany

Snarks, bandersnatches, four-dimensional rooms, halfling pie locks, riding teacups through pools of mercury. I've done a lot with the world of Red & Pleasant Land since it was first published in 2014, and I'm making some of it available now.

Check it out in The Store.
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There's Lots of New Stuff

Megadungeon level-switching level 

Graphic dungeon generator along with a dungeon it generated

Fighting a wizard and his pirate fleet in the Eight Demon River

A mountain that comes to life

Insect cult's isometric lair

Cube World #8 and #9 now available in The Store.
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Vote for what you want more of:

As you may know, a lot more adventures and materials are being prepared for The Store out of my own notebooks and cancelled LotFP projects.

Vote on what you want next....

More of the Far East material

Stuff from Bards

Southeast Asia/Drownesia

Broceliande (french/english)

Northern Europe/Germany/Vornheim

Red & Pleasant Land

Africa/Cesaire

Sea voyages

Middle East/Scorpion Lands

Tools and toys

Nephilidia / Amphibious Vampires

Goblins/Gaxen Kane

.....and megadungeon stuff

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You Are Here

When I was working on Violence In The Nympharium for LotFP the idea ended up being100 linked short adventures, so the first thing I did was go Ok we need lots of different kinds--the murder mystery one, the horror one, straight dungeoncrawl, interdimensional lunacy--everything I could think of.

So I did one about moving through a maze (like a literal maze this time) and trying hard to get a treasure without seeing a basilisk. The size scale is drastically reduced, gaps in the maze are sometimes 1' wide or less, some are just big enough to look through.

The default rules of D&D aren't meant to deal with this--you can move 30-60' in a six-second and I've built this adventure where a player needs to make tactically important left-right decisions every four or five feet.

This is where its nice to be able to draw it all out in the middle of thinking up the adventure rather than write the whole module and then hand it off to some other person to illustrate--the more of the problem I can draw, the less I have to write. By drawing the labyrinth up front I can go "Ok, let's say the basilisk hears you, how long does it take to get to you? Do we need rules for how it moves? Can it climb walls? What if the players climb the walls?" etc.

In another adventure for Nympharium the treasure was in a trap--technically in a trap which was itself in a trap which is itself in a trap, etc.

When you normally draw a dungeon, you put a little square with a "T" and then write "Pit trap" and move on with your life. By drawing the whole trap and the entire mechanism, Grimtooth-style, I managed to make this one into an adventure that'd keep a party busy for forty minutes or more.

Once I'd done a few of these, I realized this kind of stuff is so relaxing when I DM with it--like when you have one of those stress-DMing situations where you've spent weeks trying to set up a day and everyone is finally available and then the day comes and your head is in five different places and you're like oh fuck game in an hour but I haven't done laundry but if I pull out one of these "activity book" -style adventures--oh man everything is right there. No abstraction, no trying to keep track of people, it's has an 8-bit video game clarity that I can just cruise on. It's easy to stretch parts out, go into descriptions, take your time because you have all the problems the players are about to face very clearly laid out.

Obviously this approach doesn't work with everything--Castle Terravante from the first Cube World is a social adventure about a weird love triangle and drawing the castle itself and drawing little weirdoes with rapiers in it with arrows pointing at each other doesn't get you very far, you still are stuck having to invent situations and act NPCs and the majority of the adventure is going to have to be improvised around their personalities. You are less CPU and closer to just being another player (one devoted to making life...challenging..for the other four).

But when you can do it, it's nice. And it's fun to try to figure out new things to draw and what possibilities that opens up. Like I have this one notebook which is printed with a page of angles, they're presented in degrees but also as fractions over pi, so if the halfling economy is based on pi, and halfling houses are always round then...

Anyway, the new one I just put up in the store last night is a pack with three of these: The Labyrinth of the Basilisk, The Deep Trap, and The Old Empire--a like 50-room dungeon all drawn in cutaway view.

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What I've been up to for the last year

Thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic response to the new pdfs coming out, if it continues like this I'll post more...

So this is one of my notebooks, it used to be a copy of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler..

 Inside, pages have been added, removed, primed over.

I made lots of D&Dable pictures, then cut windows into the pages ahead of them....

So you've got a players' map and then each "window page" is a completely different scenario using the same image...

 That's a good, small notebook for if you just want to throw something in a bag and run a one-shot across town, the next one is much heftier...

It used to be a cook book--a compilation of La Cuisine Magazine--the contents page isn't quite finished yet..

 It's been turned into massive area-by-area atlas of the entire Cube World, kind of like all the old TSR Gazetteers mashed together. The original book was color-coded, so it used to be "vegetables green, seafood blue, meat pink" etc now its Gaxen Kane green and the islands are blue and the area around Vornheim is pink...

 I've been altering it page by page...

That's Broceliande, the western-europe mishmash where the jousting takes place. Every area has a big map, its own random encounter table, and features like this set of "staging areas" for random encounters.

The actual entries are in different formats--like, the North of Broceliande on the Goblin Empire border is a bunch of short, illustrated hexcrawl-style entries, (that's the Warbox: Broceliande module)

....and then other individual areas are longer, like this one based on populating a xylene-transfer of the port illustrated at the top of the page with a chaos warband for the players to take out (The Siege of Ortheque).

Anyway, thanks! See you soon.
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Lamentations of the Flame Princess Is Going To Go Under

The Letter

A few weeks ago, everyone that LotFP owed money got an email from publisher James Raggi IV that started like this:

This is the worst thing I've ever had to write...

I don't have money to pay out royalties this quarter (nor payments for

bank loans I'd taken out last year). LotFP is in big trouble...

As someone to whom LotFP pays many thousands of dollars, this caught my attention.

The letter went on to explain the following: 

Orders had remained constant even after the harassment campaign started last February and LotFP had their best GenCon ever, but then, toward the end of the year, orders began to drop precipitously.

This is completely consistent with what you'd expect as a result of an online harassment campaign targeting (first) LotFP's best-selling author and (a week later) the company itself for not completely disowning that author: Most people who liked LotFP stuff and didn't care about online drama kept buying things, but gatekeeper's denying LotFP access to outlets where the game could be advertised or spread to new audiences. 

Did LotFP deserve this? I didn't like that James--someone who much of my work relied on--apparently read and enjoyed a Jordan Peterson self-help book; I'm with Jeff. But call me crazy I think lying about rape--which nearly every other indie RPG publisher inside and outside the OSR did and/or encouraged people to do last year--is way worse.

And it was a lie. The online RPG community relied on its instincts and you know what their instincts got them? Adam Koebel. The best you could say is: they're idiots.

The Weird Thing About Gamers Online

Here's a weird thing that's always been true:

People love to buy LotFP stuff, people are even happy to vote for LotFP stuff (thus stuff that should not have been fan award bait like Frostbitten & Mutilated getting 4 Ennies) but when it comes to talking on the internet people like to hate on LotFP much more than they like to argue for LotFP. 

And here's the problem: all indie RPGs exist in an economic world where you either argue for stuff or it goes away. In online RPGs, there is no plausible amount of just quietly buying stuff that makes up for people loudly hating on it.

Loudly hating on stuff works. There are people out there who have no idea that every single successful OSR thing out there copies LotFP's business model, design choices, and willingness to do weird stuff, there are people who literally think its all dickmonsters because you're allowed to say that and will get shouted down on forums if you disagree.

The Hot Springs Island Theory Of RPG Economics

In the discussions that followed this announcement, I pointed this out. Jacob Hurst, author of Hot Springs Island, disagreed: he said that while, yes, LotFP's problems could be said to be based on "personality-based bullshit" the idea that LotFP fans should therefore counter smear campaigns online was a bad idea. His opinion is:

-It doesn't matter that the biggest online PDF company restricts what LotFP can put up

-It doesn't matter that the major conventions, where James makes a large amount of his money, limits LotFP's ability to participate

-It doesn't matter that LotFP's ability to win fan awards--which always boost sales--has been seriously impacted

-It doesn't matter that Allen Varney's Bundle of Holding banned LotFP

-It doesn't matter that on RPGnet and Reddit, where the largest RPG discussions happen and where a large number of new people hear about games for the first time, the moderators pretty much suspend the rules when it comes to attacking James or LotFP

-It doesn't matter that Ben Milton's Questing Beast--who has tens of thousands of followers on YouTube making it the biggest OSR review site by far, got rid of more than one LotFP review

-It doesn't matter that the same goes for the major OSR Discord, where Into the Odd's Chris McDowall, the owner, literally got rid of the rule against lying on the Discord in order to facilitate more harassment

...if you just make quality product, everything will be fine. That's Jacob's theory.

I don't think that literally anything that has ever happened in the history of entertainment economics or selling indie RPGs after 2005 backs this up, but if you do: Ok, buy something.  Much of what LotFP had to cancel is coming out right here. Prove me wrong.

This Was A Hit Job

Hundreds or thousands of people are going to take the news that LotFP is going under and be like "Yay! Fuck LotFP"

This is far less than the number of people who buy LotFP stuff, but it is enough to scare those folks away from public places online where they might kick back. In several major forums, mods who know they don't know what happened have made official policies against even discussing LotFP products because they "start fights". i.e. By rampantly attacking anything about the company, harassers have managed to make mods realize the path of least resistance is to bow to an intimidation campaign.

This was on purpose and the people who did it knew what they were doing, Stacy Dellorfano, who used to be LotFP's PR person, knew ahead of time that the smear campaign was coming, decided to join in. Stacy said there going to leave the company at the end of the year and that James should prepare for an attack on me from my ex after that.

Lots of other people joined in. It was all premeditated:

Emmy Allen/ Cavegirl has never been able to explain why she thought I "hurt" anyone (I guess saying "don't lie on the internet it's bad" is hurting by her metric? I don't know. She has never explained because she can't. Here she is in a less philosophic mood:

...but I guess "making sure you don't hurt innocent people" is not a major concern if you're a sociopathic 4chan hatemonger.) but the screencap is clear: this was all an intentional manipulation.

Emmy's blogpost about how I was clearly a monster for (-gasp-) telling her I liked some of her writing back when we were friendly and asking her to warn me if she saw people harassing me on 4chan was dutifully passed around gamer circles and even stickyposted on the OSR reddit as if somehow proved I'd done something wrong.

People fell for it, just like they fell for all the other blogposts put up that week.

The shitty people online, who want bad things to happen, are way more motivated, organized, and careful than the good people who believe in truth and facts and fairness, who somehow seem to just trust that it'll all come out in a wash that nobody is ever doing. There's no wash, the washing machine never worked, detergent was banned years ago, and the mods turned the water off anyway.

That is why the thing that you like is going away. 

So...Is LotFP Over?

Whether you agree with Emmy Allen that the hatemob she helped stir up was "violence" it certainly had an effect on James. Again from his letter:

I'll admit I mentally and physically collapsed during last spring,

between 1: now being in incredible debt with all the assumptions

supporting that debt now destroyed. 2: Coming under fire from the public

after doing exactly what I thought that same public demanded I do after

the Zak situation (cancel all upcoming projects) to the point where

valid criticism and argument and just plain shit-talking abuse became an

indistinguishable, numbing blur, and as the months went on, there was 3:

Sales of Zak's existing books still holding up, leading me to realize

that on a pure numbers basis, canceling Zak's upcoming projects (and

canceling the RPL reprint; people up and down the distribution chain

have been asking about it) was a bad business move. The dissonance

caused by 2 + 3 happening simultaneously... fuck. It still makes no

sense to me.

The dude is a mess. I've talked to him and he is a mess. He pissed off the smear campaign for not disowning me, and he's disappointed everyone else by not publishing me. He can't catch a break.

LotFP has been cut to a minimal crew, and James is gambling what's left on three new projects, all very nicely illustrated and produced. They're supposed to come out this summer.

I don't know if they will. I do know that when they do there are lots of people who will see it as a moral duty and their only source of entertainment to crap on any public discussion of them as "more edgelord bullshit from a nazi" and I know that James does not have the energy or reach he once did to push back or inspire people to do it or ask them to.

I spent ten years telling the RPG community online that they were gullible and stupid and they did not like it one bit. What I never understood was how much more powerful the gullibility and stupidity was than the better impulses to creativity, thoughtfulness and generosity. The internet sold the games, but in the end the internet won.

As I've said many times: I'm not going anywhere. Even if I never wrote another line of RPG text I have to stick around to hold the people who did this responsible, because they are totally evil and I read all the same books as you did so I know what you do when there's total evil.

But you reading this have a lot of choices about what you're going to do. Broken record time: I'd like to remind you that in this little pond your choices have consequences. You can post a thing, you can say a thing, you can tell the truth, you can ask people to care, you can try to make sure the good thing does not go away.

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